Costless Defection: How Counter-Rhetoric Neutralizes Climate Shaming
With Matias Spektor and Renan Marques.
Overview
In Western democracies, foreign climate shaming has been shown to impose audience costs on noncompliant leaders.
The Paris Agreement depends on peer pressure rather than sanctions to secure compliance. In Western democracies, foreign climate shaming has been shown to impose audience costs on noncompliant leaders, while elite counter-rhetoric has little or no effect. Using two survey experiments (N ≈ 6,100) and post-experimental focus groups in Brazil, we test whether this dynamic holds beyond the West. We find that shaming lowers incumbent support only under partial noncompliance and that targeted government counter-rhetoric—invoking historical responsibility, reciprocity, and sovereignty—fully neutralizes this effect. Qualitative evidence shows that citizens interpret foreign criticism through frames that transform foreign reputational pressure into moral vindication and national pride. The results demonstrate that peer-pressure compliance operates asymmetrically across contexts: in settings marked by post-colonial sensitivity, justifications by noncomplying leaders render defection from the Paris Agreement costless.
My Work
Selected Research
My research has been published or is forthcoming in Global Environmental Politics and Journal of Global Security Studies, and other journals.
More projects
working paper
Climate Change and the Shadow of the Future
Young people are the ones closer to experiencing these imminent consequences. Despite this, age has been overlooked as a significant explanatory variable in the literature on climate change opinions. This article seeks to fill this gap. We synthesize different studies across psychology, social sciences, and biology…
Read more
article
Determinants of Climate Change Risk Perception in Latin America
Climate change risk perceptions are subjective constructs that individuals use to interpret the potential harms of climate change and influence their engagement in mitigation and adaptation efforts. While research in high-income Western countries has identified cognitive processes, socio-cultural factors, and…
Read more
article
Beyond Jobs: Individual Attitudes Toward Foreign Direct Investment
We find that investing firms’ corrupt and environmentally damaging behavior significantly reduces public support for FDI. Recent scholarship shows that public attitudes toward foreign direct investment (FDI) are shaped by non-economic factors such as ethnocentrism, nationalism, and foreign threat perceptions. However,…
Read more
article
Climate Change Beliefs and their Correlates in Latin America
The ability of climate skeptics to block climate action depends on prevailing beliefs among the public. Research in advanced democracies has shown skepticism about the existence, the causes, and the consequences of climate change to be associated with socio-demographic features and political ideology. Yet, little is…
Read more
Contact Me
Let's Talk
If you are interested in knowing more about any of my projects or think we have similar interests, please feel free to contact me.
